The joys of the Kineoptikon

What's playing at the Roxy? asks the title song in the best of all musicals. The official answer is: "A picture about a Minnesota man so in love with a Mississippi girl that he sacrifices everything and moves all the way to Biloxi." But I find I can't help wondering whenever I hear that question if anything nowadays plays at the Roxy at all. More likely it's now a bingo hall or a cycle repair shop, gone the way of such old haunts as the Tatler, the Dominion and the Shaftesbury into post-cinematographic oblivion. But not so. There is, I discover, a Roxy running to seven screens in Hollinwood, Greater Manchester, another art deco concoction in Ulverston and a third at Ashton-under-Lyne. So the name lives on, though quite what it means eludes me.

In the beginning, cinemas were often opulent places anxious to flaunt their opulence. They called themselves picture palaces, and to those who came from modest homes to flock through their doors they must indeed have seemed palaces, with their grand ceremonial staircases right out of Gone with the Wind, and their lush candelabra and sometimes their resident orchestras.

Their names evoked aristocratic, even royal delights. The Royalty, Regent, Regal and Rex; the Majestic, the Palace, the Palais-de-Luxe (a name that survives even now in Chorlton-cum-Hardy); the Astoria, the Carlton, the Ritz, the Savoy. Some lived up to these names but some didn't. Crossgates, Leeds, had the Regal, which really felt regal, and the Ritz which decidedly didn't. Allusions to antiquity were also common for this new-fangled entertainment: Piccadilly in London boasted a Kineoptikon, Glasgow a Panopticon. Palladiums were two a penny: Golders Green had an Ionic. The Henleaze sector of Bristol even now has an Orpheus.

The mightiest name of all mixed modernity with antiquity. Oscar Deutsch gave us the Odeon, which was said to be an acronym for Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation, though it also derived from the Greek word for a venue for musical contests. I vaguely assumed its great rival, the Gaumont, took its name from aristocratic France: the Chevalier de Gaumont or even the Marquis de Gaumont, sounded much like the sort of sinister mustachioed person who cropped up in stories by Dumas or the Baroness Orczy.

In fact, it derives from Louis Gaumont, inventor of the first workable cinema sound systems. France is still full of Gaumonts, though I can't trace any here. Essoldo, a name more familiar in northern England, was another baffler. What was an Essoldo? Some obscure South American unit of currency? In fact it derived from the name of its founder, a Tyneside impresario called Solly Sheckman. His wife was named Esther, his daughter Dorothy: he took the first two letters of their names and sandwiched the first three of his own in the middle.

The rise of the mighty cinema chains expunged some of the quirkier local names. The Luxor in Richmond upon Thames became just another Odeon (but at least it survived, unlike the Royalty Kinema just down the road). The Ritz, on the other side of town, I think, became a mere ABC. But recollection gets curdled by time. Was it the Easy cinema, Cosy Road, or the Cosy cinema, Easy Road? Disappointingly, a catalogue of Leeds cinemas compiled by Robert E Preedy lists it as the Easy Road cinema. It's reassuring to find that the Lounge in Headingley is still there to be lounged in, along with the Cottage Road cinema, though the Clock in Harehills has gone; our local, the Kingsway, was an even earlier casualty, converted into a synagogue (known locally as the cinemagogue).

Yet unstandardised names survive in gratifying profusion. Cumbria still has two Alhambras, a Gaiety at Whitehaven and a Royalty at Bowness, as well as a Zeffirelli's at Ambleside (Zeffirelli's cinema and whole- food pizzeria, to give it its full designation). There is a Picturedrome at Holmfirth, often praised in print, and a galaxy of Picturedromes scattered across the land. (Drome, too, is a classical derivation. There's no such thing as a drome, apart from the department of France which carries that name; drome is what the industry calls a combining form which only comes to life when united with something like hippo-, or aero- or picture-.)

And maybe down your way there is still a Scala, a Rivoli or a Tivoli, hinting at foreign delights. But perhaps my favourite name of all has gone, and will never return.There used to be on the road from Ewell, Surrey, to Kingston a cinema called the Rembrandt. Picture house, geddit? All right, a pretty corny conceit: yet I never pass that spot without resenting the mere block of flats that replaced it.